One of my favorite jokes in the (heilige/holy) Big Book of Jewish Humor is the one about a man from Warsaw who is in Chelm on a business trip. As he walks down the street, he’s stopped by Yossel the chimney sweep.

“Zalman!” cries Yossel. “What happened to you? It’s so long since I’ve seen you. Just look at yourself.”

“But wait,” replies the stranger, “I’m—”

“Never mind that,” says Yossel. “I can’t get over how much you’ve changed. You used to be such a big man, built like an ox. And now you’re smaller than I am. Have you been sick?”

“But wait,” replies the stranger, “I’m—”

“Never mind that,” says Yossel. “And what happened to your hair? You used to have a fine head of black hair, and now you’re completely bald. And your mustache, so black and dapper. What happened to it? You know, I don’t see how I ever recognized you. Zalman, what has become of you?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you,” the man replies. “I’m not Zalman.”

“Oy,” replies Yossel. “You’ve gone and changed your name as well!” 

Aptly, you can find this tale on the internet as a case study of the humor trope “thoroughly mistaken identity.” Part of what makes it such a successful joke (you have to admit it’s hilarious) is that, like most really effective humor, it touches a deep vein in our human experience. In this case, that vein is perhaps the profound contingency of recognition. While “Zalman,” who is already traveling, does not seem to experience dislocation, Yossel invests everything into making this man into someone he recognizes. He’s so committed to that story that he never gives it up, even when “Zalman” tells him, “I’m not Zalman!” That is, Yossel is so invested in this stranger being Zalman that he denies both the truth (he’s not Zalman) and the most logical explanation for the man’s claim (the problem is in his own perception).

This issue of recognition came to mind earlier this week as I read the Book of Ruth over Shavuot. In the second chapter, Boaz spots a stranger gleaning in his field. This itself isn’t a problem–the produce that falls to the ground during reaping (leket in Hebrew) is specifically designated by the Torah for the poor. But when Boaz inquires of the young man supervising the harvest, “Who does that girl belong to?” he responds with more information than Boaz asked: “She’s a Moabite who returned with Naomi,” he tells Boaz. This immediately injects some tension into the scene, as leket is technically reserved only for the Israelite poor. (The Rabbis of the Talmud clarify later that the practice is to support the non-Jewish poor alongside the Jewish poor “for the sake of peace.”)

In one of the many moments of exemplary hesed in the book, Boaz tells Ruth that she is more than welcome to continue to glean in his field, that he has ordered everyone else to be good to her, and that she’s even invited to drink from the water that the workers have drawn. Ruth, seemingly overcome, falls on her face and says to Boaz, “Why are you so kind to me? You have recognized me even though I am a stranger!” (2:10) The English here doesn’t do it justice. The last three words of Ruth’s statement in Hebrew are pure poetry: l’hakireini v’anochi nochria. 

In many years of reading Ruth, I don’t remember these words jumping out at me the way they did this year. l’hakir—to recognize—and nochria—foreign woman or stranger—share the same letters: nun, kaf, and yod. And while they may not be technically related etymologically, they are undoubtedly drawn together here to point up the deep intertwining between them. Because what is that makes or unmakes someone as foreign, strange, different? Recognition or lack thereof. A stranger is a stranger until we realize, or decide, that they aren’t. With the act of recognition, we transform the unknown into the known. Boaz, holding the power of recognition in his word, brings Ruth over a hidden but no less powerful border.

Reading Ruth on Shavuot always comes at the time we read Parashat Naso, which, like the larger opening of the Book of Numbers, is concerned with establishing boundaries and distinctions: In the camp, between the tribes, down to the intimate lines that delineate trust and distrust in marriage (see: Sotah) and the ways we can make ourselves, temporarily, into a different kind of social-spiritual being (see: Nazir). Yet the story of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz lingers in the background, like an earlier movement in a symphony. As we consider all these ways that structure is imposed, that story might prompt us to be sensitive to the ways in which those structures–who is in and who is out, who is a stranger and who we consider known–are made and sustained, and how they are undone and refashioned.

Naso culminates in a twelve-day official parade, with each head of tribe bringing an identical offering of riches to fully inaugurate the altar of the Mishkan. We can imagine the newspapers of the day covering the pomp and pageantry. Similarly, Ruth culminates by situating its heroes in a grand genealogy that links its protagonists with their eventual descendant, King David.

Yet I think both Ruth and our Torah portion also call us to look far beyond the headlines, to the more quotidian levels on which we live our daily lives. They ask us to consider, mindfully and reflectively, some timeless and timely questions: Who do we recognize and treat with hesed, and who do we call a foreigner and treat more harshly? What does it take for us to trust, and to earn the trust of others? And what might we do to bring about a world in which we can all feel safe enough to practice the hesed of our exemplary forebears?

On erev Shavuot 1993, a Volkswagen van pulled up outside our house in Ann Arbor. I was finishing my junior year in high school, and we were preparing for the holiday. An unfamiliar older couple exited van and came to the door.

I honestly don’t remember the interaction that followed, but the long and short of it is that this was my father’s brother Arthur and his wife Kate. They had driven from their home in Montana. Art was dying and he wanted to see my father before he passed away.

My Dad was the youngest of three children. And while my brothers and I knew our Aunt Marilyn, who moved out to California early in her adult life, we didn’t hear much about our Uncle Arthur. I remember seeing a small black and white photo of a young Lou (i.e. Dad) and his much taller older brother Art, who was wearing a sweater with a big S on it—for Michigan State, but that’s about it. We never really learned the story. It had something to do with Arthur’s being 11 years older than our dad, living in Montana (even more remote than California), and (probably, given the known family dynamics) having married Kate, who wasn’t Jewish. Like many other Jewish families of immigrant parents at that time, that could be the cause of a tremendous rupture. Now, as Arthur was dying, there was an attempt at reconciliation.

All I really remember of the days that followed was awkwardness. Arthur came to shul, and I remember feeling a mix of befuddlement, dislocation, and annoyance—which, as a father, I can now see as totally predictable teenage behavior. I don’t remember having a real conversation with him or Kate, just practicing a lot of avoidance. And I don’t remember really processing any of it with my Dad after they left after a couple days. But looking back, and having experienced my Dad’s death 25 years later, I can appreciate that even the act of welcoming Art and Kate into our home was a big deal for all of them. I’d like to think some repair occurred, even if it wasn’t obvious to me how.

I’d also like to think it wasn’t quite an accident that this visit took place on Shavuot, which is imbued with such a melange of valences and impulses. There is, of course, the inclusiveness of Shavuot. It is the day we read the Book of Ruth, a paradigmatic story of chesed, the force of loving connection that sees beyond boundaries (in Ruth’s particular case, the boundary of her status as a Moabite who is prohibited by the Torah from joining the Israelite people—but who, of course, does and becomes the ancestor of King David and the messiah). And this is the day when we re-experience the revelation at Mount Sinai, when, according to the Midrash, every person heard the voice of the Divine in a way custom-tailored to them. It’s a day for celebrating the multivocality of Torah, a day whose central observance is no more and no less than delighting in the overflowing storehouse of riches of our textual tradition, our inheritance.

Yet revelation is not only a happy event. It can, perhaps even should, be an overwhelming one. “All the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance. ‘You speak to us,’ they said to Moses, ‘and we will obey; but let not God speak to us, lest we die'” (Exodus 20:16). There is disorder here, synesthesia: “they saw that which should be heard — something which is impossible to see on any other occasion,” as Rashi explains. He adds, “Startled, they moved back twelve miles, a distance equal to the length of their camp.” Revelation is not simply a warm embrace. It is that—and, in the same breath, something that pushes us back, causes us to recoil because it is so beyond the capacity of our human senses. It is a moment of both speech and silence, when everything—everything—is expressed through the utterance of the vowelless, noiseless aleph of Anochi, “I am YHVH your God.”

It’s easy to allow maamad har sinai, the moment of revelation, to be an abstraction, an idea. We can play with it as an intellectual exercise. We can read our texts and experience the delight of our minds lighting up at the stimulation. But a fuller engagement and reckoning will move us on many more and deeper registers as we experience contradictory gestures: both chesed and gevurah (unnboundedness and limitation), netzach and hod (strength and flexibility), all the worlds through which we have journeyed these seven weeks of the Omer. That journey has served as preparation for our encounter on Shavuot.

Every year before Shavuot we start reading the Book of Numbers, which begins with an instruction to Moses to take a census, counting the Israelites b’mispar shemot, according to the “number of their names.” The medieval Italian commentator Rabbi Obadia Sforno suggests that this unusual formulation suggests that each Israelite was counted not only by number, but with a recognition of their unique individuality. Perhaps there’s a Shavuot charge there for each of us as well: To encounter anew, through this moment of Revelation, the fullness of our existence in relationship with the Divine, with life, with one another, with ourselves—and, in the process, to tend what is broken, heal what is in pain, renew and redeem our lives and the world.